From Democracy to Pathocracy: The Rise of the Political Psychopath

“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School

Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

So why do we keep doing it over and over again?

There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the devastation that could be wrought if any one of the current crop of candidates running for the White House gets elected. Yet where the doomsayers go wrong is by ignoring the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government.

According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”

The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”

The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.” He advocates for the media holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff. While psychopaths may not care about how their actions harm other people, notes Beauchamp, “they very much do care about being able to hold on to their positions of power. A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”

That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

If you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.

We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be a free American, and until we can learn to stand our ground in the face of threats to those freedoms and encourage our fellow citizens to stop being cogs in the machine, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

Post navigation

Everyone needs to read the book “Political Ponerology”. Ponerology is the study of evil in politics. It reveals from in depth study that 3% of the human race are genetically born Socio psychopaths. Most of them gravitate into politics and religion. An utterly fantastic book that enables you to understand why the world is the way it is. It will change you life. http://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258 In 1984, the third and final copy was written from memory by the last survivor of the original researchers: Andrew Lobaczewski. Compiled in East Europe during the ruthless rule of Joseph Stalin.

StevetheHun

AS someone put it, you don’t have to be tall is to basketball what sociopath is to politics. You don’t have to be tall, but try and find a short basketball player. (or a politician who isn’t a sociopath).

But be careful of these psychologist… one of the first things you learn in pscyho school is that most people who go into psychology are mentally ill.

Why should we put up with a government that continuously attempts to undermine our rights and freedoms? Why should we allow our government to make laws that violate the Constitution and create a maze of legislation that is impossible to navigate without breaking some law? Why should we tolerate a government that makes laws that little by little infringe upon our rights?
Our government is busy planning our enslavement and all we seem to be doing about it is complaining about it and every so often we will elect another criminal sociopath for president and a few more for congress and other assorted offices. Replacing a few politicians with other politicians is never, ever, ever, ever going to fix what is wrong with our government. Never.
If you drive an old broken and worn out car that smokes, overheats, rattles and shakes and constantly breaks down and leaves you stranded, you don’t put a couple of new parts in it and expect it to be all better. You may get a few more miles out of it, but it’s a band-aid at best, and a waste of money at worst. Our government is in the same situation. It is in very poor condition and we keep throwing a few new politicians at it and expecting it to suddenly start doing what it is supposed to do, the way it’s supposed to do it. And it never does. And this next election will be no different. Whoever is the next president is not going to make America great again. It doesn’t matter who it is, they will improve nothing. This government is going down a one way street and no one person is going to turn it around.
This government needs to be completely replaced or abolished. Nothing short of a complete and total purge of politicians will solve anything. Anything short of that is a waste of time and we might as well burn the Constitution and bow down to our new king. Personally, I think we would be better off governing ourselves.

Dow Jones

The human beast armed with guile and charm that is destroying humanity;
Klingon or Chump…change from the deranged and busine$$ as USual as the
disease of USSA reaches its limits and finally starts killing the host.

“In the past several years, there are many more psychologists and
psychiatrists and other mental health workers beginning to look at these issues
in new ways in response to the questions about the state of our world and the
possibility that there is some essential difference between such individuals as
George W. Bush and many so-called Neocons, and the rest of us.
Dr. Stout describes a ‘composite’ case where the subject spent his childhood
blowing up frogs with fire-crackers. It is widely known that George W. Bush did
this, so one naturally wonders…”